A River Runs Through It

People from the United States and Canada just do not walk enough.  Even going one step up, we largely abandon bicycles by the time we can drive cars, or we reserve them for pleasure activities or such.  Some would say that our increased mobility and commute times are the natural progression for a cultural development that tries to include as much of the world as possible in plain sight.  We have, after all, access to an information that network that can tell us almost anything about the globe within minutes if not sooner.  Yet for as connected as we seem to be, so many of us here know so little about how people from even the other side of town live.  We form images that correlate to our political and social expectations for other people, and we dismiss other countries and regions outright just because they are different from us.  Then again, perhaps we are not so xenophobic as we are indifferent and self-centered.  We can, after all, get almost anything we need right down the block at a supermarket or even just online.

In doing so, we lose a lot of perspective.

Not so the people of thousands of years of time until recently, not so of our ancestors.  While we envision some "Indian" sitting by a creek being at one with nature with a bow in his hands, we tend to think of him as primitive and unaware of a wider world around him.  While we envision some rough and ready frontier settling Kentuckian or Ontarien splitting wood outside his one room log home, we think of him as little better, just some backwoods guy with little on his mind other than digging a root cellar.  The reality for both sorts of person, however, was quite different.  

Before the second born even came close to having regular contact with the world across the ocean, the first born were busy traveling thousands of miles up and down the vast waterway networks which honeycomb the continent.  

The Clarion River in Pennsylvania as seen from I-80 westbound looking north.  

Trades were made across vast stretches of land, polar bear furs in some cases being exchanged for shells from the Gulf of Mexico (and a bit more than that, for sure).  People in Mexico knew about the colder lands of mountain and plains to their north, as people in the Ohio valley knew about Moose hunters far to the north of them.  As much as peaceful exchanges happened between such distant peoples, conflicts also approached this sort of grand scale.  The Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), attempting to wipe out the Wendat (Hurons) chased their victims from the north shores of Lake Ontario clear to the north shores of Lake Superior, only to instead run into the Ojibwe (oh come on, you know it's Ojibway) who then fought the combined forces of most of the Six Nations back to the Alleghenies only to focus their own attention then back all the way over to Wisconsin and drive the Lakota clear out onto the plains of western Nebraska and eastern Wyoming!  

When more capitalistic minded Virginians, Quebecois, Mexicans, and such figured out that North America, while vast, was also something good to explore, settle, exploit, and marvel at, they took every page they could out of the native handbook to continental mobility and wanted to see just what was on that western horizon.  Of course, they did so the same we do, albeit with a twist: they took the highway.  The highway, of course, was the river.  

As you can see from the picture above, our rivers are just plain big even thousands of miles inland.  Sure, we have rapids and waterfalls that rival anything else in the world, but we also big wonderful waterways that can take one more than 1500 miles into the continent from their mouths at the ocean without causing too many difficulties in terms of travel hazards.  Our rivers can even help travelers cross deserts in relative safety, a feature which really helped to open up northern Mexican expansion and get people to California from out east without passing out in a thirsty mess.  We had overland routes too; they were simply indispensable shortcuts, but until the coming of the railroad, they could be difficult runs and even a bit frightening.  People usually did embark on grand journeys across the land on foot, but they often did so on a path beside the waters which they knew would lead them to a more pleasant destination, and maybe even end up as the destination itself.  

Next Post: One such river.  Let's take a look at our neck of the woods as a town on a road rather than just a town and maybe see what sort of perspective people without (yes, I know, ironic) internet would have.